The concept of Jedi Junkies is fairly simple, its a documentary about the many aspects of Star Wars fandom from people who dress up in costume for conventions and obsessive toy collectors to fan film and lightsaber makers. Fun side note: the lightsaber maker lives pretty close to us! Anyway, the problem with the film is that Star Wars fandom is just too damn big for one 75 minute doc.

In addition to the four subjects I mentioned above this documentary, directed by Mark Edlitz, also interviews a few actors who appeared in the films as well as celebrity fans, goes behind the scenes of the New York Jedi and attacks hard hitting questions like “Who shot first?” That’s just way too much to tackle in such a short amount of time.

I get that Edlitz and company wanted to cover as much of the Jedi loving-community as possible, but a bit more focus would have been appreciated. Another option would be to break this up into more focused segments, but it’s not like Netflix was doing its original series thing back in 2010.

Personally, I would have been interested in diving deeper into the collecting side of things. That’s something that I got into a bit myself, but never to the extreme levels as some of the people in the film who have multiple copies of so many toys I want! There was one guy in particular who I could watch for much longer who was married with two kids and slept on the floor because his collection took up an entire room in their small apartment. Making matters even more interesting, he knew that he had some kind of problem, but also didn’t seem like he was in a place to actually fix it. I also appreciated that they got not one but two psychologists to talk about the collecting mentality. That was a nice layer, but it was yet another aspect that made me wish this was a larger project all around.

At the end of the day, Jedi Junkiues seems to revel in Star Wars geekery which is great. It’s even well put together and, aside from the “Original vs. Prequels” and “Who shot first?” sections, it gets into some really clever and unique territory (can we stop asking those pointless questions, already?), but it’s just too ambitious of an undertaking to cover the width and breadth of Star Wars fandom with one 90 minute movie. Good effort, though!